COVID-19: Chapter 5 - BACK TO SCHOOL

Basic BBC vid on how immunity works - helped me understand a little more - covers reinfection possibility

Coronavirus: Immunity Explained…

Never wore a mask in China from 2011-2013.

In 2012, I got an absolutely awful bacterial infection in my lungs that I ignored for 2 weeks before getting treated. Doctor looked at me like I was a moron for waiting so long. This is mostly because I was. Had to get IV antibiotics every day for a week before going back to work.

A few months later, I moved to a city with less than a third of the pollution of Wuhan. Got to see a blue sky fairly often after I moved from Wuhan too!

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Every Rick must be accompanied by a Morty

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So you think having half the kids come in and infecting each other and staff is better than keeping everyone home?

What makes you think most LA schools have space for all of this outdoors activity/teaching? Most school campuses are almost completely paved over. You want the kids outside in the heat sitting on cement or at makeshift tables? Or are we talking about non class time?

It’s really easy to shit on huge school systems that are drastically underfunded, as if they want huge class sizes, and a budget that allows something like $.63 per meal, yet continued to offer breakfast and lunch for students and adult community members because they know that’s the only meal some kids receive all day.

Obviously an organization of that size will have problems with waste and outright corruption, etc. But you’re praising-then-criticizing them for doing the right thing, and asking dudebro questions about why they can’t do something worse than what they’re doing.

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FLORIDA

AZ and CA might be leveling off? FLORIDA still going nuts.

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The problem is when you have kids who don’t have reliable Internet connection or a computer they can use for distance learning. Then you have to buy them one, but that becomes a budget issue again. I think LAUSD is buying chromebooks for all students (schools in privileged areas already had them), which is a pretty huge cash outlay for 600K kids.

San Diego Unified joins LA. Of course, who knows what Ramona, Poway, Escondido, or a lot of the other suburbs will do. Hopefully this puts the pressure on the other districts in the county to do the right thing.

https://twitter.com/nbcsandiego/status/1282748642839998467?s=20

Almost 10m children ‘risk not returning to school’

At least 9.7 million children around the world may never return to school because of the coronavirus pandemic, a UK charity has warned.

Save the Children said the economic impact of the crisis on countries around the world could force children to enter the workplace early. Girls “are likely to be much worse affected than boys”, the charity said, with many facing the threat of early marriage.

The areas most at risk of seeing children drop out of education include countries in West and Central Africa, as well as Yemen and Afghanistan.

"This is an unprecedented education emergency and governments must urgently invest in learning,” Save the Children’s president and CEO Janti Soeripto said

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New study indicates how Covid-19 affects the heart

We’ve already heard about the potential long-term health impact of Covid-19, as well as its effects on the brain.

But researchers now say the disease may also affect the hearts of those hospitalised with the disease.

A new study by Edinburgh University of more than 1,200 patients in 69 countries found that more than half of all patients showed abnormalities in the heart, with 15% suffering from severe cardiac disease.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the study only included people with severe cases of Covid-19, whereas the vast majority of people with coronavirus only experience mild symptoms.

The lead researcher of the study, Prof Marc Dweck, told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme that the research marked “a very important opportunity for us to improve the care of patients”.

“Whilst this heart damage is potentially a very serious problem for these patients and [is] likely to have an important influence on their ability to survive and recover from the illness, we have very, very good treatments for heart failure now,” he said.

“And so if we can identify Covid-19 patients where the heart is involved, there’s the potential to give them the therapies that can help them get better quicker.”

I respect LAUSD for closing.

I’m just throwing out ideas as to how a school district in a place with 330 days of mild sunny weather a year could possibly take advantage of it. All schools have some green space for the kids to play afaik. The elementary school I visited in a poor Latino neighborhood had a miniature track and field. The kids did a parade on it in their Halloween costumes - cutest thing ever.

LAUSD being underfunded isn’t what led them to waste 2-55 gallon trash cans of full of uneaten food, just for Kindergartners and 1st-graders at one lunch that I witnessed. That’s just waste (one size-fits all shrink-wrapped lunches that would have been a good meal for me, dressing packets that kindergartners couldn’t possibly open) and not-caring up and down the line. I asked the janitor if at least the ones that weren’t even opened get saved - nope straight to the dumpster. I’m hoping someone grabs it out of the dumpster for homeless people at least.

The mostly liberal LA Times has endless horror stories about LAUSD.

The pressure may come from being to poor not to work and getting it would be a potential death sentence for the family economically. But it’s Brazil so u are prolly right. While it has no immediate effect on me, the conduct and attitude of Brazil’s dictator tilts me as much or more than Trumps does. We are not evening seeing this kinda BS out of NK or even Putin.

Ow I’m ordering if I would vote Putin if he were running in Biden’s place against trump.

I think I have mentioned here before, that I teach at a high-school in Germany. We completely shut down our schools in the middle of March. At the end of March there was a two-week Easter holiday and after that schools started a mandatory distance learning program (which my school had already been doing in the two weeks before the holidays).

After two weeks we gradually started reintroducing on-site classes by school year starting with the oldest. Except for very small groups only half of the students were taught in school each week and got instructions for the other week at home. Some colleagues streamed their classes online, most just sent instructions and had weekly “online meetups” to discuss problems. Personally I did this for the groups that had to stay at home all the time, but when their year was back on the bi-weekly schedule I just gave them exercises where they could practice what we learned in school and tried to only introduce new things in class.

Reopening school went well. We did not have a single case in almost three months, but that is mostly because the rate of infection in this area has been minimal. I think opening schools with numbers like you see in Florida or Arizona is not workable, as you would need to close down very soon, when people are infected.

Having half sized classes worked pretty well. Of course lessons were far less interactive and student forussed, but since groups were smaller, that still seems to have worked. One additional benefit of only having half the students in school is that we still had the same number of busses and therefore busses were only half full (actually less than that as some students only had to get to school for second period, because around 5% of colleagues were from at-risk groups and therefore continued to work from home).

Students also spent all non-lessons times outside, which will of course become more of a problem once the temperatures drop in the winter.

The bi-weekly model worked well for older students, so I would say high-shool students should be fine and middle schoolers should be mostly fine. For primary schools I think going back to 100% of lessons taught in school would be preferable, but obviously you would need a very low rate of infection. Students seem to be mostly safe, but there are tons of other people interacting with them / each other.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

edit: one additional thing I might add: Unlike American high-shools we mostly have fixed classes of students, that means they only see they have lessons with the same students in all the subjects.

I think reopening is a little more difficult on the model of mixing groups as American high-schools mostly do, but most high-schools I now have the same schedule every day, which would make alternating between groups easier. You also still only have the same number of students around you that way, it is just a bigger number of people.

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I always thought politicians would snap order the kids to stay at home. Like , just a few kids getting really sick would end their careers.

No. Putin is worse than Trump. Trump is insane and awful but too incompetent to get anything done. Putin is smart and would be able to destroy our democracy

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He already is, through his useful idiot.

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Trump has been very capable at grifting and is on a path, given four more years, to destroy our democracy.

Actually, it is. Because their food budget is so limited, they can only afford “one size fits all, shrink-wrapped meals.” I don’t remember the details, but some of that money is recouped through federal funds, which in turn depends on student head-counts, so they are basically forced to buy food for students who then throw it away. The alternative is to not offer meals to kids which, again, would severely impact those who are homeless and/or living below the poverty line. My daughter used to bring home notes basically begging students to eat the food and not throw it away, but that didn’t stop them from taking the whole meal to get the gogurt or apple sauce and throwing out the rest.

Almost like a pissed on proxy pres

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My family’s luck lol…

DECEMBER 2019 Covid-19 was with us… Not believe me, listen to my once removed cousin or is that 3rd cousin, anyways 54 mins 18 seconds in…

54.18 Starts… He says no diagnosis has been made yet and over 6 months later still finding it difficult to walk or go for a run, Ex-Football player, fit as a fiddle Joe is.